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A stunning turn of events yesterday: CNET announced that Verizon "appears to have adopted an approach to illegal file sharing that sounds very similar to one promoted and pushed heavily by the music industry." That approach? Graduated response, complete with disconnections for repeat offenders.

And it wasn't just a rumor. After claiming that "warnings to accused file sharers" could lead to a "service interruption" for those users, the site then quoted Verizon's Bobbi Henson: "We've cut some people off."

But Verizon says it's not true.

Everything about the story was extraordinary, since the RIAA has been trying to round up such ISP support for more than a year with no public success to date (some ISPs are forwarding warning letters, however). Getting Verizon on board with sanctions would be a major coup for the music industry, and would be a remarkable development coming from the company, which has always been publicly resistant to playing copyright cop on the Internet.

We checked in with Henson, who describes the story as a "misunderstanding by CNET of something I said which resulted in story inaccuracies."

According to her, nothing has changed at Verizon. The company forwards copyright infringement notices to consumers, and it says that program alone has been quite successful at reducing repeated infringement claims. It has also "not resulted in the termination of any Verizon customer’s service."

Henson stressed that Verizon "could" disconnect someone over the issue; in fact, nearly all ISPs have similar provisions as part of their terms of service or acceptable use policy. But the company has not done so, and has no plans to do so.

"Our goal is to protect our customers’ privacy and due process rights while recognizing the importance of copyright protection and acquiring content legally," according to a statement forwarded to us by Verizon. "We believe our program strikes a reasonable approach and is working very well."

CNET has just issued a defense of its reporting which relies on a reporter's notes of the conversation. Henson tells us that the comments were only about what Verizon could do, but that she never claimed such cutoffs had happened.

Who knows what happened... and in the end, it doesn't matter, because the final result is the same: Verizon still publicly refuses to adopt graduated response sanctions.